Bias Is Implicit In Our Laws

We hold these truths to be self-evident….

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal.” All White males that is. All others are considered second-class, by clear and deliberate proclamation of laws that were consciously designed and enacted.

Apologists everywhere like to assert that there has never been any conscious or deliberate intent to marginalize anybody else, and so therefore the discrimination and marginalization that take place don’t actually count — because nobody meant for such things to happen. They say things like this,

There seems to be a prevailing notion that the Patriarchal Society is some kind of conspiracy amongst men to marginalize women, and that women have always been powerless to fight back. Both of these assertions are false on their face.

It’s true that a lot of bias is unconscious and takes place subtly, and may even be in ways that are not overtly intended. But there’s also been plenty of overt bias going on too.

How do I know? Simple — laws!

For at least the past 10,000 years there have been laws that specifically restricted the rights and full citizenship of women. Before the advent of agriculture, most anthropologists agree that humans lived a much more egalitarian existence. For more on that, read here. Some of those laws were still on the books as recently as 50 years ago in the United States of America. So yes, actually, men did sit down to deliberately plan to marginalize women, and although women were not completely powerless to change that, it did take 10,000 years to make much headway.

This overt discrimination didn’t take place only in the ancient past. We had to amend the Constitution 19 times before we got around to giving women the right to vote in America — in other words, to be considered full citizens of this country. It took almost a century of active protest, education, and persuasion to get the necessary support to pass the 19th Amendment. Black men were given the right to vote in 1870 with the ratification of the 15th Amendment, a full 50 years before women of any skin color. There was active opposition to both of these amendments, that was conscious, deliberate, and very clear about its intentions.

I could sit here all day making a list of the laws that have deliberately discriminated again women, LGBTQ people, and African Americans. But I don’t need to do that, because you, the reader, are no doubt well aware of those. And on top of the laws, we’ve also got years of customs to overcome as well.

The men who set up country clubs to exclude Jews, Blacks, and single women made those rules very consciously and deliberately. There are still archaic and discriminatory rules about women in many golf clubs as of today.

The men who decided that women could not apply to go to Ivy League colleges did so with very clear intent.

The banks that declined to give women home loans or even credit cards in their own name well into the 1970s made those rules consciously. They were the same banks who purposely made it difficult for Blacks to get home loans, a practice that still continues to this day.

“Five decades after the Fair Housing Act prohibited racial discrimination in lending, African Americans continue to be denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than white homebuyers, especially in the South.”

Again, I could fill page after page with specific examples of deliberate sexism, racism, and homophobia, but I don’t need to because all you have to do is open your eyes to be aware of it everywhere. Even in places where laws have changed, most of that was in the very recent past — only one or two generations back. Thousands upon thousands of years of deliberate marginalization and discrimination don’t become magically erased a mere 50 years after the advent of new laws.

But what’s a whole lot more important than assigning blame for past wrongs or trying to exonerate the people who perpetrated them, is to go forward in the present co-creating a better world for all people. There has been and still is a lot of conscious intent to discriminate against and marginalize certain people. There are still some laws that do just that. But even in situations where the intention isn’t to do so, if unconscious bias and negative stereotypes are in play, harm is still being perpetrated. Pretending it’s not there isn’t what leads to a better society. Naming the elephant and agreeing to do better is what does!

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.